For 2011 so far, BlackBerry has 32.2 percent of the business market while iPhone has 45 percent

BlackBerry phones have been known for their business use, but a new survey indicates that this is no longer the case. The new business smartphone of choice is the iPhone.

The survey was conducted by enterprise mobility provider iPass, which obtained a quarterly Mobile Workforce Report from 2,300 enterprise workers.

According to iPass' results, BlackBerry has slipped to second place in the business realm. Only 32.2 percent of the mobile worker market consists of BlackBerry phones while 45 percent of this market uses the iPhone.

Last year, BlackBerry had 34.5 percent of the mobile worker market while the iPhone only had 31 percent.

Creeping up behind the iPhone are Android-powered devices. In 2010, Android only had 11.3 percent of the business market, but this year, it climbed considerably to 21.3 percent.

Nokia sits at fourth place with only 7.4 percent of the enterprise market. Last year, it was at 12.4 percent.

Overall, 95 percent of mobile workers currently use smartphones, and of this 95 percent, 91 percent use their smartphone for work. These numbers have increased from 85 percent and 69 percent respectively in 2010.

BlackBerry's fall to second place may not seem too surprising to some. Just last month, Research In Motion (RIM), developer of BlackBerry devices, experienced a four-day outage that left many around the world without BlackBerry services. This affected many mobile workers who depend on these services to keep their businesses running. The outage started in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, then spread to North America, Canada and Latin America.

Well, though I hold absolutely no credence to a survey conducted by a company that sells a related product, I would surmise that iOS devices seem to be preferred in most small to midlevel sized workplaces.

Though, it has nothing to do with Apple or RIM... merely, there are so many iFanatics out there, that many have sought to make a buck with specialized business products. Third parties have created iOS equivalents of point-of-sale systems for restaurants, diagnostic and repair tracking tools for mechanics, medical info submission apps (and even a few apps that can run basic medical diagnostics using the iPhone sensors that previously required specialized equipment) -- hell, you'll even find several major metropolitan police departments that have switched completely over to Apple products, though most of the workers don't really know how to use them.

"Nowadays you can buy a CPU cheaper than the CPU fan." -- Unnamed AMD executive